“If you scream or shout, or do anything, I’ll cut your throat. I mean what I say--do you hear?” “Why didn’t you leave her upstairs?” growled the woman. “Because I wanted her here, where I could see her. Find my silk handkerchief; I left it in the study. And bring the irons, I’m not going to take any risks.” The woman went into the room and came back. Suddenly Lois felt the handkerchief against her mouth. “Don’t struggle; I’m not going to hurt you, unless you shout. Get the irons.” “Here!” said the woman’s voice. Lois felt her wrists gripped and dragged behind her. In another second she was handcuffed. “Sit down there.” He pushed her into a chair, felt at the gag, and grunted his satisfaction. “Listen! He’s knocking.” _Tap-tap-tap!_ Silently the two stepped into the darkness of the front yard and the woman called. “Who’s there?” And then came a voice that made the girl half-rise from her chair. “I want to see the master of this house,” said Michael Dorn. Chapter Twenty-six It was the worst kind of fortune that Michael Dorn received news of two early morning departures from aerodromes situated a hundred miles apart; and worse that he should have chosen the Cambridgeshire venue first. Here the telephone enquiries he made gave him little information, and it was not until he arrived at Morland that he found the early morning passenger was an undergraduate from Cambridge who had been summoned home through the serious illness of a sister and had left for Cornwall. “I wasn’t in the office when you enquired,” said the aerodrome chief, “or I would have told you that.” “It can’t be helped,” said Michael. He went back to his car and studied the map. He was separated from Whitcomb by a hundred and seven miles of road, mainly indifferent; and, to add to his troubles, he had two bad punctures in the first twenty miles and went into Market Silby on a flat tyre. By the time the new tyre was purchased and fixed he had lost a good hour of daylight and had still the worst of the road to negotiate. And it was by no means certain, even when he reached his objective, that he would be any nearer to finding the girl. During the period of waiting while the tyre was being fitted he studied the little time-table he had made that morning. The girl had been taken from the police station in the neighbourhood of two o’clock, he had discovered. She had left in the car for an unknown destination, and at eight o’clock--six hours later--Chesney Praye had wired him from Paris. Supposing he had flown from a private aerodrome near London, it would have taken him two hours to reach the French Capital, which meant that he must have departed somewhere about five o’clock.